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Do we really need Facebook?

There are a couple of things that have made me reconsider Facebook. This manifesto details multiple practices most of which are illegal in Europe and undesirable everywhere. The European regulations will become more rigorous next year. Their behaviour includes, un-consented endorsements, mining the phone camera store to obtain meta data, and identifying other people in the pictures, and controlling the phone mic. Salim also states, that they

… track your location, and use that to discover private things about you, like if you’re sick (because you’re at the doctor or a specialist), who you sleep with (who’s beside you at night), where you work, if you’re job-searching (1-hour meetings at competitors offices), etc.

This is before we consider the fact that messenger and what’s app both know who you talk to, and in the case of messenger can read your texts for content and meta data. They also upload your address books to try and sell Facebook to the unconnected.

They sell the data to corporate and political entities.

He also talks about the filtering of messages, such that you don’t always get posts from friends; it’s not even reliable. They block people at very low volumes of complaint which opens the process up to abuse by colluding with denial of service attacks designed to censor opposite opinions.

This all leads to you act as observation points for those that don’t want to be on Facebook. We are the agents in the corporate surveillance society.